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Tuesday 20 April 2010

Heidegger and all that

Sometimes one just stumbles on the most interesting things....

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Thursday 15 April 2010

Self-Published Titles Topped 764,000 in 2009 as Traditional Output Dipped

Self-Published Titles Topped 764,000 in 2009 as Traditional Output Dipped: "A staggering 764,448 titles were produced in 2009 byself-publishers and mic..."

This is a very interesting development indeed, showing that readers (and writers) are starting to dominate the market, as are niche interests. All of this is no doubt giving the traditional publishing industry serious pause for thought.....
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Friday 9 April 2010

The Secret Inner Life of Alzheimer's Disease: A Spiritual View

The Secret Inner Life of Alzheimer's Disease: A Spiritual View
I stumbled on this amazing article about Alzheimer's while doing research for something I am writing at the moment. Not only is it full of inspiring and comforting insight about an increasingly prevalent disease, but it is also beautifully written. I pass it on as my thought for today.
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Tuesday 6 April 2010

eReading Devices | eBookGuru.org

eReading Devices | eBookGuru.org
I am eagerly following the current discussion about e-readers since the unveiling of the iPad, which I am sure will oust the overpriced one-stringed instruments out there.
Aside from the technology used to deliver ebooks, the future of ebook publishing seems to be rather more difficult to predict. The industry is undergoing a revolution, putting authors and readers in the driving seat of what is being written and read, but throwing up a plethora of new issues about how livings are to be made (what will happen to agents? to publishing houses?) how authors are to promote their own work and what is to be done about such bastions of the publishing industry as copyright. Will we see a return to the pre-Enlightenment era of no intellectual property rights, only skilled developers and deliverers of the written word or melody?
It's an exciting time, for sure.
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Saturday 3 April 2010

Riemann for Anti-dummies: introduction and critique

Riemann for Anti-dummies: introduction and critique
You know how you sometimes get an apparently random idea in your head while you are working on something, and it doesn't seem to make any sense, but it just won't go away? Well while I was working on Moldavite, the first part of my novel (downloadable from www.meiraeliot.com) I kept thinking of Mozart, again and again. I kept thinking about the wit, brilliance and lightness of touch in his music, the pace and the elegance of his composition - the way his melodies seem both simple and complex at the same time. "Now that is how I want to write," I kept thinking. It may be because I was raised in a musical family - my mother was a professional soprano - that I have always found musical analogies meaningful. When I am editing my writing I also read the text out loud at least once and take anything out that trips up the flow of natural speech.

I am now several chapters into Part Two of the novel. This part is called Il Filo, or 'thread', which was the term Mozart's father Leopold used to describe the motif developed in the various parts of a musical composition. Mozart learned this art in Vienna by making a detailed study of Bach's fugues, which astonishingly from our present perspective were virtually unknown in Austria at that time. After the event, genius always seems to have a kind of inevitable quality about it, a sense of natural evolution, but on the ground and at the time it is usually acquired by hard work, study and practice. If the 'thread' did not have enough mileage in it for development and counterpoint, then this was usually a reason to abandon the composition, as numerous abandoned works by Mozart testify.

Riemann for Anti-dummies offers a fascinating journey into the often hidden connections between apparently unconnected things - time-space, the audio-visual, the architecture of creation and the thought processes, mathematical and philosophical, that underpin it.
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